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Une nuit sur le mont chauve (Night on Bald Mountain)

Directors: Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker
Year: 1933
Run-time: 8 min
Source: Youtube

 Notable For: Our first animated film on the list is one of three from 1933, all very good, made with very different techniques.  Night on Bald Mountain is a rare example of pinscreen animation, which the directors invented themselves.  Each frame is a delicate shadow cast by millions of pins arranged as part of a device which is in principle like on those pin impression toys you might remember.  The result is eerie and extremely textural.  Night on Bald Mountain is, like the scene in Fantasia from several years later, set to the evocative Mussorgsky piece.  It's a succession of strange, occult images, much looser than the Disney creation, but closer to the menacing nature of the musical work.

Verdict:  It's worth seeing, although unfortunately the picture quality is poor and much of the delicateness of the images (which can be still be seen in a few surviving stills) is lost.  It's still an unnerving work with a rare imagination.
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